Monday, June 19, 2017

The king of all typo-riddled books is Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom. HarperCollins wound up pulping the entire first print run of 80,000 copies after it emerged that an early version of the book was sent to the printers by mistake. As a result, the book teemed with hundreds of mistakes in grammar, spelling and even characterisation.

The Corrections author discovered the catastrophe surrounding his eagerly anticipated book in a brutally public way. Recording a reading for the BBC current affairs show Newsnight, Franzen came to an abrupt halt and said: “Sorry, I’m realising to my horror that there’s a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and it’s still in the fucking hard cover of the book.”